A pulsed Doppler radar system that may be used to determine a detected object's range relies upon a signal, such as a compressed waveform. The signal is transmitted and received back by the radar system; i.e. the compressed waveform echoes back from contact with the detected object. The received signal is then correlated against a reference waveform, where the reference waveform is substantially identical to (or sometimes the complex conjugate of) the transmitted waveform. Hardware that is part of the radar's transmission and receiving components can degrade the transmitted and/or received (echoed) signal. This degradation may manifest itself in terms of increased integrated or peak range side lobe levels and other amplitude and phase distortions. The degradation further results in difficulty by the system to correlate the transmitted/received signal to the reference waveform.
To compensate for this problem, radar hardware generally had to be very carefully designed and manufactured to remove the inherent hardware impairments, which is very costly to design and manufacture. Accordingly, improved signal resolution may be attained if the reference waveform were modified based upon the known and/or identifiable hardware errors that degrade the transmitted/received signal.